No libertarian is an island

Libertarians who see no good at all in government have a false notion of liberty.

By DAVID HORSEY
Hearst Newspapers

Almost half a century ago, Bob Mays, the young pastor of a small church in north Seattle, envisioned a retirement complex where the elderly could find loving care, no matter how poor they might be, and a permanent home, even if their money ran out.

Mays shared his vision with his congregants at Olympic View Community Church. They enthusiastically embraced it. A number of them mortgaged their own homes to raise capital for the project. And, in 1972, Northaven, a non-profit retirement community, opened its doors.

Last week, my wife, Nole Ann, and I helped host a fundraising celebration for Northaven, and recalled Bob Mays’ selfless dream. Nole Ann talked about how her father joined with Mays to help build Northaven. At the time, it seemed clearly the right and Christian thing to do. My father-in-law could not have known that, after his death, Northaven would become a wonderful final home for his wife, my mother-in-law.

That’s how community works. People band together, sharing their time, labor and wealth, to do important things for their struggling and needy neighbors. They do it out of humanitarian impulse without expecting to be paid back. But, one way or another, they do benefit.

Few would argue that such humanitarianism is not a civic virtue. But when those humanitarian gestures come with the backing of government, virtue becomes villainy in the eyes of many of today’s neo-libertarians.

Communitarian and libertarian philosophies have both enhanced American life from our earliest days. Yes, individual freedom has been our constant guiding principle, but the way we have managed to sustain that liberty has always been by acting in community, sometimes with the force of government. From the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we have made laws to give order to our freedom. And we have used government projects and programs — from the Erie Canal and the Homestead Act, to free public schools, Social Security and the GI Bill — to bring more and more individuals into the full scope of liberty, prosperity and legal protection.

Despite our illusions, none of us is entirely self-reliant. All of us are part of a community and benefit from that community, whether we are rich or poor. Try running a successful business if there is no government to enforce contracts, root out corruption, keep streets safe, build roads and bridges or educate and train workers. Try living a good life if streets are filled with destitute and lawless people or if air and water are polluted and food is unsafe. There are certain things individuals cannot do for themselves.

Everyone needs a community and all have responsibilities to that community. The poor have the responsibility to not break the law and to take every opportunity offered to improve their situation rather than live permanently on someone else’s generosity. The affluent have the responsibility to provide those opportunities – not just by building businesses that provide well-paying jobs, but also by sharing a portion of their wealth through taxation to pay for a social safety net; the schools and training programs, medical care, unemployment insurance and child nutrition programs that sustain those without resources and enable them to escape poverty and rise in our society so they and their children can help shoulder the load.

To some Americans, though, this communitarian sensibility is suspect, subversive and way too European. To resist it, they have banded together in a libertarian surge that has transformed US politics.

The hard truth about many of today’s anti-tax, anti-government libertarians is that their philosophy comes down to little more than myopic selfishness. They want smaller government, not because there is any real threat of tyranny, but so they can do whatever they wish with their property or business, regardless of the consequences to their neighbors or the shared environment. They vote to eliminate the taxes that support the social safety net, pulling information out of the Internet’s fount of fabricated “facts” to prove it’s all a scam to waste money on undeserving freeloaders.

I suppose that undeserving class of freeloaders would have to include the residents of Northaven. You see, Northaven could not be sustained without the support of Medicaid. I guess, in the libertarian view, those old folks who have spent lifetimes raising families and working at jobs that did not pay enough should be left to fend for themselves rather than have government lend them a hand with somebody else’s money.

I make a pretty good income and have no loopholes or tax shelters to exploit like the wealthy, so I pay more taxes than most people. I don’t love it, but I don’t resent it, either, because I agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” The anti-tax zealots don’t seem especially concerned about civilization. Whether holed up with their assault rifles in a wilderness cabin, riding high in a private jet on their way to a Palm Springs golf course, or busy running another anti-tax ballot campaign, they feel scant obligation to their fellow citizens.

To them, liberty is the freedom to be left alone, to do whatever the hell they want with their property and to keep it all for themselves. That’s a cramped definition of liberty that assumes that anyone can escape what happens in the outside community. No one can. Ask any rich South American who has been forced to flee his country when the inequities in his homeland got so extreme that the social order was overthrown by revolution or an epidemic of crime.

One way or another, if the problems of a city, a state or a nation are neglected, those problems will spread and eventually end up on everyone’s doorstep. Forget empathy, generosity, humanitarianism or Christian charity. Be selfish, but still grasp this hard truth: Taxes are anarchy insurance, the fee we pay to guarantee we don’t lose it all.

David Horsey is a cartoonist and columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

Jay Jochnowitz

14 Responses

In contrast to the parade of stereotypes and platitudes offered here, most libertarians recognize that a free and prosperous society requires the rule of law where property rights are mutually inviolable and that concentrated political power is an inherent danger to the rule of law and a peaceful society. Most recognize that a market economy depends on peaceful cooperation between parties and I’m pretty sure most know enough about economics to know that high taxes and government intervention does not create prosperity or a sense of community but cripples private investment, not to mention private charity.

Amen to this article, as it touches upon many important points that are imperative for many Americans to understand. No Andrew, I don’t think these are stereotypes, when you look at the Tea Party crowd (who are merely re-packaged Libertarians), and the cries of many prominent in that movement for a complete and utter end to Social Security and Medicare. Do you have any IDEA of the hardship and poverty this would cause? Or do you even care, as long as it’s not YOUR parents who, no doubt, can look forward to being supported by your “rugged individualism” in their declining years? But seriously, can anyone be expected, after a lifetime of wages cheapened by global competition, and the 250K price tag per child (500K if they go to college), to still have accrued the 2 million dollars which is said to be needed for retirement these days?

The Libertarian/Tea Party movement is basically ANTI-patriotic, because it says “drop dead” to anybody outside of the charmed circle of your blood relations (including the US as a whole), and in essence advocates send the country back to the policies of Dickensian England even while other countries are seeking to advance to embrace the 21st century.

Carol B. – These people read “Atlas Shrugged” when they were young and impressionable, and took to it the way a fundy Christer takes to the Bible. They do not care about pragmatic concerns, but only about the doctrinaire dogma being spoon-fed to them by corporate high priests like Limbaugh and Beck.

Truth: Clearly, and it is all the MORE reason to continually hold them accountable for their indefensible positions. And indefensible they are, since the Teapublicans are clearly desperate when they have to trot out people like Ms. Palin and the Christine the teenage witch in a cheesy attempt to distract the public from the hard-and-fast issues.

“Few would argue that such humanitarianism is not a civic virtue. But when those humanitarian gestures come with the backing of government, virtue becomes villainy in the eyes of many of today’s neo-libertarians.”

So taxing the hell out of productive people to pay for foolish government programs is humanitarian?

As long as you have the “backing” of the government. Or “progressive” cartoonists.

This country was founded on individualism. If you wish to engage in charitable behavior that is your right, just as it is another person’s right to not engage it. You or anyone else have no right to their income. And attempting to use force as the government does to extract income from people is wrong and will always be wrong. It is nothing more than condoned thievery and tyranny.

gd: Perhaps you missed the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Nobody likes to be taxed for “foolish government programs,” and certainly the middle and working classes don’t like being taxed disproportionately to pay for the freeloaders at either end of the economic spectrum. But if you want to abolish taxes completely, I suggest you move to Malawi. I assume you’ve become accustomed to your paved roads, police and fire departments, clean air and water, safe food supply, national defense, education for your kids, etc.? Sorry, these things don’t come for free. And I don’t wish to live in a country where, after having our substance pilfered by the wealthy and their puppets in Congress through every conceivable chicanery, the wealthy then pat themselves on the back, and convince themselves they are going to Heaven, just because they dole a few crumbs back to the hard-working people of this country under the guise of “charity.”

Carol B. – Not even sure gunga dan even read “Atlas Shrugged” and suspect the “Clift Notes” were scanned lightly before he signed on to extreme support for the lucky few at the top that he hopes to personally be benefited by, by sitting under their table waiting for some of their cast off crumbs. I’m afraid he is a “true believer” and like most of the Tea Party rubes, unreachable.

gunga dan – Of course you would reference a book that in its issued language is translated as, “Mien Kampf”. It was required reading in a course I took in my Junior year, covering fascism, and I admit that it has helped me to understand the motivation of the corporate Right you seem so enamored with.

Truth: My mother survived Nazi Germany, and what she told me about the way things were there are frighteningly reminiscent of what’s starting to happen with the far right here today, from the pronouncements of “We are a Christian nation,” to information blackouts, to the “you’re either for us or you’re against us” mentality,” to Tea Partiers stomping on a woman’s head at one of their rallies. Those who later comprised the bulk of Hitler’s forces were originally seen as the thugs on the street corner, not very educated, radicals not to be taken seriously. When the far right makes comparisons between Democrats and Nazis, they simply do not know what they are talking about. With my perspective, it makes me all the more anxious and alarmed when I see what’s going on in the U.S. today. Europe went through its fascist phase, which makes the people there more hip to it when they see it happening. I just hope the U.S. doesn’t have to make the same mistakes before we finally arrive at sanity.

gunga and his fellow travelers=the death rattles of the angry white far right who think income derived through exploitation and theft is a sacred entitlement, and the hell with the rest of the world. Socialism for profits and wealth accumulation, anarchy for the little people. They are rapidly becoming a minority of the American population, and will be unable to win elections in less than 20 years due to the sheer influx and propagation of non-white American citizens.